An art print of a Giant Bluff Weta in a pixel-painted style, hung on an art gallery wall, showcasing its oblique pose and detailed features.

The Design Inspiration: Great New Zealand Wildlife Photography

December 31, 2024 / / No Comments

The inspiration for the design came from superlative wildlife photographer Rod Morris. Chrissie and I visited Rod’s image library in Dunedin back in the 90s when we were there exhibiting with The Great New Zealand Craft Shows. We were looking for slides that he had cherry-picked. These slides had the potential to be developed into hand-separated wildlife art for screen printing.

Making It Simple: Breaking Down the Colours to Just Seven Stencils for the Original Screen Print

The giant weta t-shirt print finished art, reduced, on a transparent background.
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Art for reproduction. Shaun Waugh at the drawing board uses a 0.35mm Rotring technical pen to illustrate the Jewelled Gecko (Naultinus Gemmeus) in a pointillist illustration style onto a dimensionally stable sheet of translucent mylar substrate. The original illustration is rendered in landscape orientation at an enlarged size, 600 x 450mm.

Crafting New Zealand Wildlife Art: The Art of Colour Separation

December 27, 2024 / / No Comments

The Art of Art for Reproduction: Rediscovering the Charm of Hand-Separated Rendering for Screen Printing

In the modern world of digital design, where every line can be perfected with a click, there’s something uniquely captivating about the traditional methods of graphic design. Today, I want to take you back to the early ‘80s, to the Graphic Design School at Auckland Technical Institute, where I spent over four years mastering an art form that’s as meticulous as it is magical—hand-separating colours for screen printing. Rendering shading, texture, and detail to achieve a realistic depiction of New Zealand native animals and plants.

Art for reproduction. Shaun Waugh at the drawing board uses a 0.35mm Rotring technical pen to illustrate the Jewelled Gecko (Naultinus Gemmeus) in a pointillist illustration style onto a dimensionally stable sheet of translucent mylar substrate. Right photo: Shaun charcoal drawing on coquille board the dark green colour-separated layer of the Jewelled Gecko ten colour art.
Rendering method. This process is performed using a lightbox where light shines through the reference highlighting the areas to be drawn in a careful pointillist transcription method with a 0.35 mm Rotring pen onto Mylar film or delicate charcoal pencil shading onto textured coquille board.
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